Astronauts

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT ASTRONAUTS - PAGE 3

By James Fisher and John J. Glisch, The Orlando Sentinel, April 25, 1986

The remains of Challenger`s seven astronauts will be flown from Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday to a Delaware Air Force base before they are turned over to families for burial, NASA announced Thursday. No family members are expected to be present when the seven coffins are loaded aboard an Air Force C-141 transport plane at the shuttle runway, where Challenger`s flight was supposed to have ended. Fellow astronauts, a military honor guard and NASA officials will accompany hearses carrying the coffins to the runway from a life sciences facility where pathologists identified the remains, the space agency said in a brief statement.

CAPE CANAVERAL -- For Discovery`s awestruck astronauts, the receding horizon shimmered in greens and blues. "It looks like somebody drew a curtain all the way around the horizon," shuttle Commander Mike Coats said Monday as he described the aurora australis glowing over the South Pole. While Coats detailed his wonder to NASA ground controllers, a Strategic Defense Intiative experiment in his space shuttle`s cargo bay photographed the atmospheric phenomenon in infrared wavelengths. Military researchers hope the camera work helps them learn ways to pick out hostile missiles that could pass near the luminescent curtain on their way toward the United States.

It wasn't terrorism. That was the first thing I'd wondered. It was the first thing the older woman told me at the store in Delray Beach when we started talking about the tragedy Saturday morning. One of the things my nephew in Louisiana mentioned when he called to say he'd heard a sonic boom around the time of the disaster. It's emblematic of the changed world we live in that when we now hear shocking news on a national scale, we reflectively reach for "terrorism" on our mental checklists.

CAPE CANAVERAL -- The last time Mario Runco Jr. wore his spacesuit, he was beneath 15 feet of water in Johnson Space Center`s giant swimming pool. Early Sunday, Runco got a taste of the real thing and was able to see a blue-and-white world spinning 185 miles under his feet. "Boy, that adrenaline rush when you look over the edge here is amazing. I`m used to seeing the `north` sign in the pool," Runco told ground controllers via his radio headset in his spacesuit helmet. "I can tell you, this is pretty awesome from here.

Their son the astronaut was supposed to be training in Houston on Saturday, getting ready for his fourth shuttle mission in May. Instead, Brent and Joan Jett, of Oakland Park, got word that Brent Jr. had been hurriedly sent on a mission of a different kind. "He's headed to Dallas to the crash site -- the site where the debris is," Brent Jett Sr. said. "He's on the investigative team." Brent Jr., Northeast High graduate and top of his class at the U.S. Naval Academy, is among the relative few who have flown a space shuttle mission.

CAPE CANAVERAL -- With their space plane chasing a European satellite, astronauts aboard the shuttle Endeavour were planning today to flex the robot arm that will pluck the science-laden box from orbit later this week. Mission specialists David Low and Nancy Sherlock were to activate the 50- foot-long arm this morning and wave it around Endeavour`s cargo bay to make sure it is in working order for Thursday`s planned retrieval of the Eureca spacecraft. With Monday`s successful launch behind them, crew members Janice Voss, Jeff Wisoff, Brian Duffy and Ron Grabe were to begin working on Endeavour`s other main objective: monitoring two-dozen experiments in the shuttle`s Spacehab module.

Instead of runs, hits, stolen bases and the traditional slab of hard-chewing bubble gum, the newest generation of trading cards tell of liftoffs, orbits and moon walks. The cards` creator, Edward White III, may not be able to rattle off Nolan Ryan`s pitching record or Pete Rose`s lifetime batting average, but he can name the last astronaut to step foot on the moon and the shuttle astronaut nicknamed "Buck Rogers." The answers can be found in his 110-card collection of astronauts and space events -- the first edition in a series White hopes attracts the attention of collectors and space buffs.

Like fishermen at the end of a luckless day, the Atlantis astronauts on Wednesday abandoned their efforts to cast a satellite out into space on a 12- mile line and slowly reeled it back into the space shuttle`s cargo bay. The action left them disappointed by the failure of the first large-scale test of tethered space flight. The astronauts had battled a stuck cable that delayed release of the satellite on Tuesday. Their reel mechanism had stalled, and the line became badly snarled. Four times over two days they had tried to reel out the line to its full extent, but the satellite never went farther than 845 feet above the shuttle.

It was not until the final moments of the space shuttle Columbia's doomed flight that its crew realized something had gone badly wrong. But even at the outset of the mission, the astronauts were told of the possibility foam debris had damaged the orbiter's heat-resistant tiles shortly after liftoff, NASA officials say. "The crew knew there was a potential impact damage about the same time the engineers [on the ground] did," said Michael C. Kostelnik, NASA's deputy associate administrator in the Office of Human Space Flight.

WASHINGTON -- The Rogers Commission report on the Challenger disaster did not address the question of how the shuttle`s seven astronauts perished but it did say the crew cabin smashed into the ocean on its left side, apparently in one piece. The only significant mention of Challenger`s astronauts in the commission report said the crew had no warning of the impending catastrophe. "There were no alarms sounded in the cockpit," it said. "The crew apparently had no indication of a problem before the rapid breakup of the space shuttle system."